04/09/23 - FAQ Answered!

[First of all, lemme say, thanks for all the questions! I’m gonna do my best to answer all of them to the best of my knowledge! Keep in mind that I really enjoy comments, and if any weibo post is confusing or lacking context, feel free to ask! I’m happy to explain any time. Sometimes, I genuinely forget some super basic aspect of Chinese society is super bizarre to everyone else.]

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Sometimes you refer to something by a Western social media equivalent, e.g. referring to 'an askreddit thread'. What are the actual sites in these cases? I know a handful of Chinese social media sites, but not well enough to translate the names in my head on reading. - By Vat

Yeah, I try to use western social media equivalents because it’s the quickest way to get the concept across, instead of writing a little essay every time explaining what these websites are. China has its own equivalent for almost every major site, because the great firewall makes it almost its own segregated internet isolated from everything else.

The most commonly referred to site is what I call “Chinese askreddit”, which is named Zhihu (知乎). It technically started as a WikiHow or Quora equivalent, but almost all the threads on there are asking for cool stories or opinions, and it’s very well known for having a lot of made up stories baiting for likes and clicks. It also apparently has a system where you can write a super long post and then charge people to read the latter half of it, so it’s sometimes used by people to post short stories? Anyway, I think the closest cultural fit for it is clearly askreddit threads.

There’s what I refer to as Chinese instagram, which is Xiao Hong Shu (小红书, literally little red book). It actually started as a website where you can get people to shop for you overseas, get stuff that’s not available in China, and ship it back to you. But now, it’s mostly a place where people take staged, photoshopped-to-hell photos with a clickbait-y instagram story attached. It’s also where a lot of internet influencers are, promoting hotels and tourist spots and restaurants.

And obviously, Tiktok is tiktok.

Weibo (微博) itself is also a pretty interesting existence. A lot of times, I’ll explain it to people as Chinese Twitter, and for the most part, it’s true. It’s got a character limit, it’s where people get their news, important government decisions are announced there, you know. But it has a button you can click that gets rid of the character limit, so most people actually just use it as a proper blogging platform. There’s quite a few very popular bloggers on there whose content is just transporting over the best of the other sites’ content, which is why I think it makes for a particularly good window into what people in China are paying attention to.

There’s also WeChat (微信), which is sort of like Chinese Facebook—you add your friends, you have a wall, etc, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s honestly hard to find a western equivalent to WeChat because it has so many functions. It’s the primary way for people to get in touch with each other, so WeChat is sort of like a phone inside your phone, or maybe Chinese Zoom. It’s what most workplaces use to coordinate. It has a wallet option that is the primary way that people pay for anything in China. The wallet option is just about as well fleshed-out as a bank, letting you invest, buy insurance, and buy bonds with your WeChat. You can hail taxis and get plane or train tickets or book hotels with it. You can shop on the internet with it. During Covid, your proof of health was on your WeChat, and without a WeChat account, you couldn’t even leave your own house. It is the primary way that people transfer money in China, because WeChat doesn’t take a fee to transfer money, and you pay for everything with WeChat too. You can even download games inside WeChat and play phone games in the app. It is legitimately like one app that is all apps.

There’s Zhifubao (支付宝), which is like Chinese PayPal and also a commonly accepted payment method in China. A lot of people like to save their money on Zhifubao because interest compounds daily. It’s also the main platform for taking out internet loans and splitting purchases into payments, and is the source of most internet debt in China (probably, I dunno, it’s hard to find statistics on this).

And finally, there is QQ, which is sort of like Chinese Discord? It’s mainly a chatting service, and it’s probably the oldest of any of these sites. I remember QQ existing when I was a toddler. You can join various communities and interest groups, or just chat to random people, sort of like AOL back in the day. It’s not nearly as prominent these days as back in its heyday of the early 2000s, though. Nowadays, it’s known for mostly being populated by little kids and middle schoolers because it is one of very, very, VERY few Chinese internet platforms that don’t require you to confirm your identity by uploading a photo ID.

I've seen some real Hot Takes on here that seem like they might have been satirical, but the very detached context you present them makes it hard to tell, especially coming from a radically different society. I'm particularly thinking of the take that testosterone levels/sperm count were decreasing because too many men were manual labourers. When you're translating humour/satire, how do you approach and contextualize it? Or have they *all* been sincere Hot Takes, strange as some might be? - By Vat

I don’t remember all the Hot Takes that I’ve covered, but the sperm count decreasing because men are working out too hard one was very sincere, I believe. This is not a super unusual thing to think in terms of Chinese medicine. Generally speaking, if someone is being satirical, I’ll translate it as, “A blogger jokes that…” And I’ll try my best to put in a joking tone. But I honestly think (without looking back on all my posts and taking an actual count) that 90+% of all the Hot Takes I cover are entirely sincere and it reflects how Chinese people tend to think.

Sometimes you talk about Dowries vs Bride Prices and I'm confused. I assume dowries are paid to the groom's family, but what's the point of having both? Doesn't it just cancel out? And is this something that's still normal for all people, or is it only in the more rural areas? - By Charlie P

To get into Bride Price, I need to get into Chinese law. So, as I’ve said in reply to a different comment, getting married and having children in China is a very, very expensive endeavour. Chinese average wage is not that different from America, just about 45K to 55K depending on region. But, in China, if you are not a homeowner and you merely rent, then you cannot use public education. And private schools in China are exceedingly rare, extremely expensive, and not very good for the most part. They’re mostly designed for preparing students to go study overseas and pass the SATs or something, instead of educating you in the context of China. Almost none of the medical procedures associated with pregnancy and childbirth are covered by insurance. If you are sick and you have no money, hospitals aren’t going to treat you and just collect on the debt later. They’ll throw you out to die. I’ve regularly heard of people with cancer who are doing half the amount of chemo that they’re supposed to, because they can only afford half the chemo, for example. And the regular, every day expenses associated with childcare are way higher too. I can buy a can of formula here for $35~ But a can of formula is China is about 225 RMB, just to give you an idea.

The assumption is that marriage is for the sake of having children, and once you’re married, that is a top priority task. So understandably, a lot of women don’t feel safe getting married without some kind of guarantee that the man is financially stable enough to deal with all of these expenses. Thus, the idea of a bride price. Note that a bride price has always been a thing throughout Dynastic Chinese history, but this is the practical reason why that tradition has not disappeared in the modern day like some other traditions. For a reasonable family, the woman is supposed to invest it into all of these expenses. Chinese sexism has meant, though, that often time, parents of the woman will take the bride price and use it to pay for her brother’s marriage, so he can find a wife.

But some men started feeling like it was unfair that they’re the only party that has to pay all this money to get married, so a trend started up calling that dowries should be equal to bride price. The idea is that if the man is saving up all of this money to pay for an eventual pregnancy, deal with childhood illnesses, save up for education, etc, etc, there’s no reason the woman shouldn’t set aside the exact same amount. It’s not as though it’s not her kid too.

Dowries have also existed in Dynastic China, but back then, it was one of the few tools of power that a woman had. Dowries are money that is explicitly the wife’s property, that a husband could not legally touch. It’s something you can rely on if you have an absolutely terrible relationship with your husband—just for the sake of your ability to bring in rental income, he would put up a face of being civil to you, for example. But nowadays, dowries and bride prices are in fact pretty much just the same thing. It is the money that the man and the woman (and their families) set aside and save up to invest in the new family that they are starting up.

Legally, though, there is still a distinction between them. Legally speaking, the bride price is a gift to the woman on the condition that she marries you and has children with you. If she were to divorce you a short time later without ever getting pregnant, after blowing all the money on hookers, you could sue and get the full amount back. A dowry is a gift from the woman’s parents to their daughter, so that she has money to fall back on if her husband is a dick to her. If he divorces her a short time later after blowing it on hookers, she cannot sue to get the money back, because there is not an intrinsic legal assumption that it was gifted conditionally.

Bride prices are a thing everywhere, but the amount is very different province to province. I think the lowest bride price is Guangdong, where it can be as low as just 10K or thereabouts. The highest is Jiangsu, where it’s closer to 300K. On average, bride prices will be much higher in rural areas than in cities. This is because there are much less women in rural areas, and low supply means high price.

There is also a concept in Chinese marriage of 入赘 (Ru Zhui). I can’t find a good translation for this word, because I’m not entirely sure the concept exists in the western world. But it basically describes a man marrying into a woman’s family, instead of the other way around. So, for example, their children would take the mother’s name, instead of the father’s. For Chinese New Year and other major holidays, they would visit the wife’s family instead of the husband’s. And the woman would be the one to buy a house that the man would move into—a house which doesn’t necessarily have his name on it. In this case, he doesn’t have to pay any bride price at all, and there is not yet a tradition of a man bringing a dowry. It’s basically the cheap way out in return for giving up the continuation of your surname and your dignity, I guess, because people make fun of it a lot.

How much do people tend to self-censor around politically sensitive topics? Do people have an intuitive understanding of what is and isn't allowed? How likely is a blogger to run into troubles from an honest mistake? - W. Geist

People self-censor quite a lot. In fact, the self censorship is generally a lot stricter than actual censorship, because people don’t want to get in trouble or lose their investment. For example, ever since the government has announced an attitude of being against divorce and for multiple babies, all of a sudden, every daytime soap opera in China no longer writes plots involving divorce, and is all about plotlines where characters have babies. Is a plot line involving a side character who is a divorcee really going to get your show cancelled? Probably not. But are you going to risk it?

As a result, for a lot of bloggers I translate, the original post will censor out a lot of words like “kill” or “death” or “rape” that can be typed no problem, that doesn’t get automatically censored, but they’re not typing out just in case it gets them into trouble down the line.

There are things that are obviously not allowed. And sometimes people are brave enough to speak up about it anyways, like every single person who reposted the Chained Woman situation in Fengxian. In that case, I’ve heard of cops showing up to people’s door and, uh, “politely requesting” that they take down the post.

As far as the actual government actually fucking with you over a genuine honest mistake? I’ve never seen it happen. If it’s just a genuine slip up and you’re not trying to rile people up, I think the worst that happens is your account gets banned for 3 days or a week. Or your editor messages you like, “Hey, you need to edit this post.” if you’re a writer.

How much of weibo is rural vs big city? - By Leon

I don’t know the actual statistics or anything, but it’s very much majority big city, from what I’ve seen, just because most of the population is in big cities. And also rural China is sincerely rural as fuck. There are plenty of rural villages that don’t have electricity yet, never mind internet. Even in my childhood in the 90s, my hometown’s greatest piece of technology was a single tractor that the whole village shared. Most families still went about on donkey back. I think it was 2008 that my family in Shandong first got a home computer, and to this day, that’s all they have—a single computer for the whole family to share.

My grandma has a smartphone now, because we bought it for her, but she can’t use most of the functions on it because she’s illiterate. She never went to school, because she was the oldest of 13 kids. And all of them worked and made money, so that the youngest could afford to go to school. My grandpa only got 3 years of primary school education, and he taught himself how to read as an adult.

Do you think the people who post on Weibo are representative of China as a whole? I assume they are younger? A bit richer than average? What do you think? - By mmmmmm

It’s a pretty well-known joke that everyone makes average six figures a month on Weibo or Zhihu. But in reality, I think that weibo is actually pretty representative of young to early middle age people living in big cities in China. The demographics (at least in the trending posts section that I have seen) leans slightly southern (which is more metropolitan, whereas north China is more agricultural).

Just the nature of weibo—that it’s mostly a mobile platform that requires the internet to run—means you’re not going to be seeing the older generation like my grandparents who never went to school. And you’re not going to be seeing anyone who’s too poor to afford reliable internet, obviously. But that’s not really an aspect of China you’re going to see if you go there in-person anyways, because nobody ever goes to Bumfuck, Middle of Nowhere, Gansu. Because there’s nothing there.

The majority of China’s population is, in fact, people living in bigger cities, making slightly above average wage.

Similarly, I understand that arranged marriages are illegal in China, but I think it would be useful to get a sense of how much influence parents have in their children's choice of spouse.

Legally speaking, the parents have no say in who their child marries. But if you want children (and that is the assumed purpose of marriage), then you want to be married fairly young, right? At the latest, by the time you’re in your mid-thirties. Well, you’re not going to put together enough money to buy a house and afford a child by the time you’re in the mid-thirties. Not in the big cities, anyhow. And there’s hardly any women in rural China (for obvious reasons), so just buying a house in a rural village isn’t going to solve your problem. So practically speaking, you need your parent’s financial support in order to get married. And that gives them quite a lot of say.

Culturally speaking, the way this is generally done is that your parents would go through their friend network and introduce suitable people to you. You’d go on a first date, tell them who you are, what you’re bringing to the table. Hear out who they are and what they’re bringing to the table. Then decide if you want to continue. You’d generally date for a while, just to make sure the other person isn’t lying their ass off. And then a year in, usually, you’d meet each other’s family, formally get engaged, and start planning a wedding. You know, assuming you don’t fall in love on your own with someone in your social circle. It happens, but I feel like most people get married through being introduced.

There are professional services who do this too, if your parents have too small of a social circle. They’re called 媒婆 (Mei Po), usually an older woman. But they’re often considered less reliable than your parents, because a lot of times, they’re just trying to get you married off so they can collect on that fee, instead of actually getting you good, reliable people. A lot of times, a lot of very problematic candidates that nobody else will take collect in the hands of the Mei Po too, and they’re known for trying to offload those trash on you if you look like you’re easily fooled. Basically, they’re like the secondhand car dealer of China.

A few posts you've translated have mentioned families owning multiple homes. How common is that in China? Is it more of a holiday-home in the country situation, or for rental income? - By Rach

It’s not nearly as rare as in the West, for one reason. A lot of times, multiple homes are bought because people have multiple kids. If it’s a boy, well, he’s gonna need a house in order to get a wife. You don’t want him to be forever alone, right? So if you have three boys, for example, you’ve got to work hard, save money, and buy each of them a house. So you gotta start early. Sometimes, you’ve got two houses set aside for the older two while you’re working on the third, before any of the boys have even come of age. If it’s a girl, well, lately, women have been complaining about the lack of security living in a husband’s house that doesn’t have your name on it, with nowhere to go if you have a fight. A lot of women have been saying that it’s sexist to not also buy your daughter a house. So, it’s not really a holiday home or rental income, it’s more like future marital home for your children.

Why not make your children buy their own fucking house? Well, because unless you’re a government employee in China, you can’t really rely on social security when you get old. There is no medicare. And like I said before, when you eventually get ill in your old age, if you don’t have money, the hospital will just watch you die. So your child cannot afford to save up money to buy a house or wasting their pay cheque on a mortgage, because they need to be setting every cent they can afford aside in order to take care of you in your retirement.

Why not make your children buy their own fucking house, and you set aside your money for retirement in your own savings account? Because any amount of money in the bank doesn’t do you any good when you’re old and decrepit and barely lucid. A younger child has the wherewithal to contact a lawyer or the police to track people down if they get screwed over. But as an old person on your own, even if you had the money to pay for a retirement home or medical care, how much energy do you have to actually get a lawyer if the hospital double billed you on purpose? Or the retirement home took your money and didn’t actually deliver on services as described? What are the chances you can survive until the case is settled? Or is the lawsuit just going to die with you if they just drag it out a bit?

If it’s a single child, then only exceptionally wealthy families would bother investing in more than one house, and in that case, it’s for a combination of rental income and real estate investments. As China rapidly industrialises and expands, real estate prices have shot through the roof over the last four decades. For an entire generation, they have watched houses triple or quadruple in value in a single year. It is considered easily the most lucrative way to invest your money. That isn’t quite as true anymore, as Chinese population growth has stuttered quite a bit, and it has caused a dramatic slow down (or even fall, in some areas) in housing prices. But nonetheless, a lot of wealthier people in the older generation still like to put their money in real estate.

I want to ask what kind of anonymous online forums exist in China. Anonymity removes accountability in many cases (ex. 4chan) and showcases some quirks of society by highlighting a specific group with diverging values (ex. Korea's feminist separatist movement). Do they exist, what are they like, what are their values/social norms? - By EmergencyNow

I know that anonymous spaces exist in China. I’ve seen anonymous chatrooms. I have no idea what they’re like, because I try to spend a little time on the Chinese internet as I can help it, because it’s just a very depressing society with a lot of very depressing problems, and it stresses me out. I’m sorry, this is just a question I don’t have the knowledge to answer.

For questions, how much does getting good grades and into a good university really influence your career/earning potential in China? Is all of the emphasis on pushing kids to study justified? In what ways is it different from how things work in the US? - By YumAntimatter

How important is getting into a good university? Somewhat more important than in the western world, certainly. There are a lot of blue-collar work that makes quite a bit of money and is socially respected in America. Some of the highest earning people I know are welders and lumberjacks, and they’re very proud of their jobs. But that’s not really a thing in China, because of the massive population. Incredibly dangerous jobs aren’t necessarily paid very well, and there is a lot of exhausting, demeaning manual labour at the bottom of society. If you don’t have a GED or a university degree, you will spend the rest of your life working in a sweatshop. And there are plenty of internet articles you can look at for exactly how terrible conditions are there.

But having a university degree doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’re free from that hell either. As more and more people make it to university, degrees become less and less important because of over-supply. It used to be that having a degree pretty much guaranteed a cushy job. Nowadays, there’s a real risk that chances are, you’ll either have to accept a 3K a month minimum wage office job, or drive for GrubHub. If a family can afford it at all, they’ll do their best to push their kids through a Master’s Degree. You know, until that becomes overabundant and useless too.

I’ve covered some posts before about how uni graduates get paid minimum wage (2500 RMB a month roughly), but the average construction worker or sweatshop worker gets paid 8-9K a month. This is sort of ignoring a lot of unspoken benefits of a proper office work—like how you’ll have a proper 401K, you get health insurance, you get maternity leave, etc. You’ll almost never get your arm eaten by a machine. And you’re in a much better position to date and get married.

At some point, the government tried to address the problem that university degrees are becoming less and less valuable. The way they decided to do this is to put a hard quota on middle school and high school graduation. Only 50% of middle schoolers can graduate to go to high school. Only 50% of high schoolers can graduate to go to university. That’s the root cause of the insane amount of stress these last couple of years. It’s the definition of involution. If on average, people score 350 in a test out of 750, half of them are going to fail. If everyone studies really hard, and the next year, they push the average up to scoring 500 out of 750, well, half of everyone is going to fail anyways.

This pressure varies a little according to region, because this 50% of everyone has to fail thing is local, not national. So if you live in a province with higher population, you’ll face dramatically more pressure than attending school somewhere like Xinjiang or Tibet. My home province of Shandong is known as one of the worse provinces to be in for national exams. The same score that will get you into the Chinese equivalent of Harvard or Princeton in Beijing will not even get you into community college on Shandong.

The situation is made worse by a number of other laws and policies. For example, the syllabus has changed a lot over the years to squeeze more and more material into one year. Instead of spending a semester or a year teaching the alphabet, for example, schools will require teachers get through the whole alphabet in a week. Not a lot of 6-year-olds are gonna be able to keep up with that if they’ve never learned the English alphabet before. So, it becomes absolutely necessary for children to take tutoring and pre-learn material. Nowadays, you’re not considered to be even trying unless you’ve learned the entirety of middle school curriculum by sixth grade, and finished the high school curriculum while in middle school.

As of the last year or two, people are complaining how much money all of this tutoring adds up to. In order to have a hope of competing, it’s estimated that you have to blow easily 100K a year on tutoring. So the government tried to ban tutoring. But that’s not really going to fix things so long as the fail rate is kept at the harsh 50%, is it? So now we just have illegal underground black market tutoring—so it’s just as necessary, but now twice as expensive.

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[Some of you might be asking, “Wait a minute, what about mmmmmm’s question about feminism and the position of women in China?” I haven’t forgotten about that one. But mmmmmm is right—it’s a very big ask, and it’s going to come with a very big answer. I’m going to write an entire other post just dedicated to this question, to be published tomorrow. This FAQ has been really fun. Perhaps I should make a regular once-per-month thing out of it. What do people think?"]